Teranesia

From LeoWiki

Teranesia			Greg Egan		Hard SF
10	10	8	10	7	9
Secularity	Technophilia	Quality	Xenophilia	Personal Tilt	Average

Egan writes two kinds of novels -- far-future symphonies and near-future concertoes. This one falls firmly in the concerto territory.

Specifically, Teranesia is driven but only one idea. That makes it similar to Quarantine -- also driven by a single idea -- and Distress -- driven by a lousy idea, but also supported by a brilliant conception of a political utopia.

The far future novels, OTOH, marshall a horde of ideas. In Diaspora, the life-changing chapter on organic 12-dimensional computers is a but a tip of the delicious iceberg.:)

Anyways, Rajendra and Radha, two Indian biologists, are signed by a biotech company to study a strange new species of butterfly on an island in Indonesia. They are killed by an inopportune civil war, but Madhusree and Prabir, their kids, escape to Toronto.

Two decades later, Prabir leave his loving partner Felix, a curator at the Royal Ontario Museum, and joins his now biologist sister in Indonies for some good clean scientific fun.

Unusually for Egan, there are some obvious jokes in Teranesia, but I wouldn't go as far as calling the book a satire. Some of the buzzword-primed tautologies Egan has post-modernists spout are hilarious, but those dialogues aren't very common.

This book could as well have been a short story, but it's an enjoyable novel nonetheless with a solid plot and characterization.